Cosmic radiation includes high-energy atomic particles. When cosmic radiation strikes an integrated circuit, the high-energy atomic particles can create a string of hole and electron pairs in a substrate of the integrated circuit. This charge trail results in secondary electrons, which are then unbound and travel to circuit nodes where they are collected. A circuit node of the integrated circuit can collect the holes or the electrons. If a storage node collects enough charge from the electrons, the value stored by the storage node can become corrupted. This corruption of a storage node is denoted a soft error because the integrated circuit again operates properly after a reset and/or correction of the corrupted value.
For applications in a space environment, the impacts of high-energy particles may be simulated using a simplified model of deposition of a fixed charge per unit length of a path of the particles through a semiconductor device. This simplified model is sufficient for the space environment because ions almost always have sufficient energy to pass entirely through the semiconductor device. The energies of these ions range beyond 1 GeV (gigaelectron volt) and the mass of some of the heavy ions ranges from the mass of a hydrogen atom (a proton) to the mass of a gold atom. However, within Earth's atmosphere, particle radiation energies generated as secondaries from an atmospheric high-energy neutron strike are significantly less than those encountered in space. The range of the ion track in the device is typically less than tens of microns and impacting ions deposit most of their energy just before they are stopped. Therefore, the simplified model used previously to determine the upset error rate in a space environment is not sufficient to provide an accurate estimation of the error rate from particle radiation in an atmospheric environment.
One or more embodiments may address one or more of the above issues.